


yet apt the verse

by tortoiseshells



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Chloroform Shortage, Confederates Complaining About Benjamin Butler, Doggerel Poetry, Episode 1x06, F/M, Gen, Gratuitous Naval History, In Which Jed Foster Prefers Intestinal Parasites to Silas Bullen, Incorrect Opinions About Walt Whitman, Mansion House Literary Society, Offscreen Amputation, Season/Series 01, gangrene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-20 17:00:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16559687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortoiseshells/pseuds/tortoiseshells
Summary: A slice of life on the wards, June 1862, or, the one where everyone's a (literary) critic.... when they're not caught up in matters of life and death.





	yet apt the verse

**i.**

The disagreement, thought Mary Phinney, over how to pronounce “Varuna” seemed to be regional in its origins. Her fellow New Englanders avowed “var-oo-na”; some Midwest men espoused “var-eh-na”; and one lonely Mississippian persisted in pronouncing it “Var-ee-na”, despite all written evidence to the contrary. Still, the grumbling was not her most pressing problem. That was Emma Green sweeping off the ward with a look that mimicked sugar and promised stormy weather, all over the self-same word, and the doggerel verse it had come from.

None of the men seemed to much notice the Rebel nurse’s stage-exit – Corporal Munro loudly scoffing at the rhyming of “keelson” and “possession” appeared to be the issue of the moment – so Mary quietly set aside her fresh bandages and followed Miss Green’s path out into the hall.

**ii.**

Mary Phinney was a woman of many gifts, though none of them were being easily found. Perhaps that was well enough for the moment, Jed Foster thought, emerging from the hospital’s cellar kitchens and feeling too much like Orpheus escaping Hades. The steward left a smear, a smudge. He shrugged and brushed at his cuffs, as though that would get rid of Bullen’s damned treachery.

Checking the wards turned up nothing, though the denizens of the former dining room swore she’d been there just a few minutes before. Where had she gone? None of them knew, exactly, though one or two pointed vaguely towards the main hall.

He huffed in frustration, and was trailed out the door by some verse one of them continued reading: “Who has not heard of the deeds she has done?”

It wasn’t Shakespeare, he supposed. One could be grateful, in times like these, for that.

Mary was indeed in the main hall. Arms crossed and gloriously irritated, she spoke quickly with Nurse Hastings. He missed most of what she said – something about reading, on the wards? Encouraging it?

Nurse Hastings wasn’t impressed, or moved. “Drivel,” she sniffed.

Mary pursed her lips, shifting her weight minutely in a way that, Jed knew, prefigured her barbed wit. “I suppose ‘Casabianca’ is more to your taste.”

Someone in the hall coughed, abruptly, poorly covering up a laugh.

“Also drivel. Campbell is far superior. ‘For the deck it was the field of the fame, and the Ocean was their grave.’ My grandfather was with Nelson, you know. And Captain Broke, in 1813.” With a thin, superior smile, she continued on her way as regally as she could.

Miss Hasting’s progress did, befitting her poetic tastes, put Jed in mind of a ship, and he said so – none too kindly. He kept Mary in the corner of his eye as he did, covertly watching for her reaction: amusement, or censure? She smiled, though she tried not to say it.

“She must miss her home,” Mary said, as kindly as possible, to cover up her unfriendly amusement.

“Not as much as she’d miss lording over the colonists,” Jed quipped back, gesturing to her to walk before him.

“She has me bested in naval history alone. Nelson, I understand. Campbell, another poet. But Captain Broke?”

“Are you admitting to a failure in your Yankee education, Nurse Mary?”

“If I have been failed, you must have been as well. You cannot possibly understand what she means.”

“No, no,” Jed ceded, smiling broadly at Mary’s pique, that irritation that sparked in her eyes and made her lips twitch, “But I am only a Southern doctor.”

“Yes, only a Southern doctor educated in France, Germany, Scotland, and other places besides. How inadequate.”

“Speaking of inadequacies,” he began, far less gleefully, turning away from the ward and lowering his voice still further.

The light in her eyes disappeared almost instantaneously. “No more chloroform? At all?”

“None,” he confirmed. “I mean to have a word with Summers.”

“And in the meantime?” Jed watched her set her mouth in a grim line, and guessed her thoughts followed a similar path to his own: tallying the wounded who had a desperate need of surgery, as well as those who might need it. Fresh casualties, too, might come in at any time. Could they be moved, sent elsewhere? Could other hospitals spare the precious medicine? Could their pilfered supplies be found – or were they gone forever, used up or poured out into the Potomac?

“We must proceed with what we have. No surgery except in the most urgent cases.”

“Of course,” she replied, turning to return to her work, pausing only to ask, “Have you seen Miss Green?”

“The blue-bellies have come for one of her boys,” he deadpanned, “She’s preparing to do battle with those poor soldiers. General Pope should draft her.”

Mary nodded, distracted. 

**iii.**

Emma handed off Private Fontaine to the Yankee guards with as much courtesy and grace as she could, bidding the Alabaman to mind his bandages as well as his manners. “Remember,” she drawled, “Doctor Foster’s said exchanges are quite frequent. You’ll be home in Mobile before Christmas.” 

“Yes, Nurse Green,” he replied, a crooked smile at her concern.

“Good,” she said, distracted, “Good.” Surveying him one last time, she reassured herself that everything she could have done for the boy had been done – cared for, fed, darned. Emma quickly adjusted his empty cuff and sleeve, checking that they were fast to his buttons. “Good,” she repeated herself, feeling foolish, blinking furiously and lowering her eyes.

“Good-bye, Nurse Green.”

“Yes, Private Fontaine. Good luck – Good-bye!”

And when he was gone, Emma found herself nearly alone in her little ward. It was strange, the quiet. Unsettling. Only Corporal Morse remained of her countrymen, her charges, and the poor soul slept the days away, requiring almost nothing from her.

Without Fontaine, without Morse – without anyone needing anything from her – there was nothing to hold her thoughts in check. Her anger had a physical component: knees buckling and bitter bile in the back of her throat. Tom buried, Father imprisoned, and Frank! Distant – cold-eyed – cruel, almost – refusing to help her! Implying that she – that she could – that she’d willingly betrayed the Cause! That she’d abandoned her family – and him!

Her breath sounded something between a hiss and a hiccough, and she pressed her hands to her mouth. Had she? Had she done as Frank implied she’d done? No! No – of course not – and yet? She worked from morning until night in a Yankee hospital, and of late – though how could he have known that? – she’d done as Nurse Mary’d asked her, and helped her on the Union wards. But that wasn’t treacherous, that was charity, Christian kindness. Surely there were Union women who tended Confederate boys, and wasn’t that fairness? A kind of just exchange? That even if she spent an hour reading Shakespeare with excitable Private Campbell, some New York woman might at that moment be writing home on behalf of a wounded Virginian boy? 

But to care for those who stood with Papa’s jailers? The Yankees had her father in chains, ailing in the dark, as though he were an animal – and for what? Not signing the oath? It was a sin to lie, and by God Papa was paying for it, but to lie so that a boy could rest next to his father, in the bosom of his family for eternity? This last, little thing that could be done for Tom Fairfax – a small thing, as good as a sticking plaster on a missing limb. Her father was setting right what she had done wrong. If she hadn’t helped Tom escape, there would be no need of burying him. She would be here, reading Captain Marryat aloud to him, and Papa would be at home. They both would have been where they belonged.

Injustice. It was injustice, all of it, to arrest her father for burying Tom with his ancestors. And Frank – Frank was right. She was giving comfort to Northern boys, soldiers who would likely as not cheer to hear that some Reb had been locked up for “treasonous subversion”. Men and boys who, at this moment, were hooting and crowing over Union victory in Louisiana, where Beast Butler had threatened the honor of any Confederate lady for demonstrating their loyalty – women like her. If those Union boys knew what she had done, what she was, would they be kinder than Butler? Would Private Campbell beg her for just a few lines more of _Romeo and Juliet_ , would Corporal Siddons bless her for writing home to his nieces for him? 

Would Nurse Mary press a cup of tea into her hands at the end of another day, and thank her for her efforts?

Emma Green slumped forward, pressing her eyes shut, breathing deep. Willing herself to order, to master her unruly parts, to put away childish things. To weigh what she had done, and what could happen. She could not support the Federal Cause, and that was just and fair. Her family did not, her home did not, and so she could not – Emma Green could not support the Union and be a good child of her parents and forefathers. But there was such awful suffering, and she had been the cause of some. It was a kind of duty, too, to provide Christian kindness. To bring mercy where it was wanted most. Was one duty the betrayal of the other? 

She had no answer, and her thoughts chased each other for some time.

**iv.**

After a half-moment to compose herself, to pray for God’s mercy for the men, Mary returned where she had left, to find that little had changed in a half-hour’s passing.

The men were still occupied with the verse, though they’d apparently set aside pronunciation in favor of loudly criticizing Private Parker’s lackluster reading, or the poem, or both. Though it would not meet with Dr. Hale’s exacting standards of military order, Mary hardly thought it a quarrel, and so she set back to her tasks, minding what was being said in the background:

“It’s not Whittier,” groused Munro, arms crossed and propped up in his bed, still weak from camp fever.

“Whittier? Hell. It’s not even Whitman,” someone else said, further down the ward – McCormick, she though. Another unfortunate scoffed at the same time that Dening asked who, exactly, Whitman was, and Kelly cursed McCormick with his characteristic flair for the profane, and so on.

“Gentlemen,” Mary reproached, firmly, before the Mansion House’s nascent literary society could come to the attention of its resident disciplinarian. 

“Yes, Nurse Mary,” came the reply, some more sullen than others.

There was a period of quiet – labored breathing, rustling of wool blankets, hoarse coughing excluded – before another soul waded into the breach: Cheesebro, the young private whose dressings she was shortly to change. “It’s Var-oo-na. I know it’s so. My brother Asa works the shipyard that built her.”

“Oh, shut up, Cheesey,” grumbled Kelly, whose bandages Mary was presently engaged with.

“It’s so,” insisted ‘Cheesey’ “Mystic-built, she is. Mallory yard. I saw her launched before I joined up.”

“Doesn’t say much for your brother’s handiwork.”

“Reb shot did for you as well as it.”

Mary finished with Kelly’s dressing and moved quietly on to Cheesebro, greeting him kindly before setting to work.

“Where’s Mystic, Cheesey?” Dening asked from across the ward, forestalling more traded insults.

“Connecticut, close by on Rhode Island.” Mary unwound the old dressings from the private’s arm, mindful of the boy’s hiss of pain. “Good for boat-building, bad for everything else. Says my ma every summer, at least.”

Hard times farming seemed a more common experience than shipbuilding, as the others agreed or disagreed about the worst places to make a go of it. New England seemed to get the worst of it, though Munro made a compelling enough case for New York – at least, she was reasonably certain Ausable was in New York, or at least that Munro hailed from that state. Frowning, she tried to recall, only to stop short as she pulled away the last of Cheesebro’s bandages. Redness, discharge, stench. Gangrene.

 _God above_.

Mary quietly, calmly, covered up the open wound and rose to her feet, promising to return shortly and that Cheesebro had no cause for alarm. He did – he most assuredly did – but that would hardly be helpful, and he’d know it soon enough. Where had Jed gone? She looked left and right in the hallway, spying little Sister Isabella carrying water pitchers, and Matron standing between two orderlies, cards scattered between them. _Succor and comfort for the sick and the wounded_ , indeed, she thought, the blasted poem still winding its way through her thoughts.

Sticking her head into the former ballroom yielded no better: only the Chaplain sat next to one of the beds, taking dictation from a soldier wounded at Harrison’s Landing.

She would not entrusted Cheesebro’s care to Hale, if she could help it. She climbed the stairs, moving through the other wards, barely escaping Corporal Gielgud’s amateur theatrical society, until she finally found him, pacing in the supply closet. Mary mistrusted the glinting of his eye, especially so close to the morphine.

“It’s all gone. And other supplies, besides,” he fumed, scowling at the shelves. 

“The chloroform?”

“Still. Some quinine, too. And spirits. Hardly surprising, given the parasites in Mansion House’s bowels. Lord above, Mary, I would rather deal with hookworms than Bullen and Hale!”

“It’s not parasites,” Mary started, striving for calm, “But I have need of your help. One of my patients – Cheesebro, shot above the elbow. Gangrene’s developed in the wound.”

Jed muttered an oath. “How long since? Do you know?”

“There was no sign of infection in the morning rounds.”

“Seven, eight hours? At most? That’s something, at least. Let’s see him.”

If Jed had hoped she was wrong, he did not say it. Mary half-wished it for herself, that out of the strain and long hours she’d conjured what she’d most feared. But the fever was in Cheesebro’s arm, not her imagination, and Jed’s demeanor slipped, infinitesimally, as he examined the Private’s upper arm.

“Doc?” Cheesebro’s already quiet voice seemed timid.

“Gangrene has set in,” he said, tonelessly, gesturing at the swollen, weeping tissue. The wound almost seemed to have worsened in the handful of minutes she was gone. “The infection will expand quite rapidly, unless interdicted. You’ll lose the arm. I – I’m sorry, Private.”

Cheesebro nodded, trying for bravery.

“Go prepare the surgery,” Jed ordered, and dropped his voice to a whisper, “And get the three biggest orderlies you can find. Duffy, I think, and Gomes. Whoever else.”

Mary did so. A moment of quiet in her kitchen, and then she return to her wards. She could not dwell on the goings-on upstairs.

**v.**

Emma shifted in the uncomfortable cane-back chair, trying to ease the ache in her shoulder and still keep the afternoon light on the book in her hands. Private Morse had long since fallen asleep, but she read on, quietly, hardly bothering with the voices as she did while he was alert. Morse seemed to find comfort in _Beulah_. The troubles of an orphan girl must have seemed to him small, indeed.

“Miss Green?” Mary Phinney appeared in the doorway, abrupt and almost out of breath, as close to flustered as she’d ever seen, “Come with me, please. I have need of your assistance.”

Emma set aside Private Morse’s novel. “Of course, Nurse Mary.”

“Excellent. I have a patient – just out of surgery, without chloroform. He suffered terribly. I need someone to mind him.”

Steps stuttering, Emma protested. “I know so little – I am hardly qualified – surely, there is someone else? Who may help him?”

“I would sit with him myself,” Mary said, voice laced with chagrin, “But there is another patient in a worse way. I am tending him with Doctor Foster, and will be on the front ward, if you need me.”

“The others?”

“Busy. Or sick. I’ve sent Nurse Baldwin and Nurse Younge to Wolfe Street and the other hospitals, to find what chloroform can be spared. Nurse Hastings has a debilitating headache. You are here, Miss Green, and you have proven your capability to me.” Nurse Mary paused, in the doorway, gesturing down the ward. “Chaplain Hopkins is with Private Cheesebro now. Do not hesitate to find me, if his condition worsens.”

A reassuring smile flashed across Nurse Mary’s countenance, and then she was gone, moving purposefully through the next ward.

Emma nervously ran her palms across her apron-front, and shifted, uncomfortably. Another Union boy, today above all others. If it was a Heavenly test of her previous resolve, it was a sharp one. She put away thoughts of her father imprisoned, and imagined what she had before: that somewhere, far from here, some Northern woman was tending a Virginia boy. She approached the bedside, clasping her hands so they would not betray her nerves, and smiling placidly.

“Chaplain,” she greeted, “Nurse Mary said Private Cheesebro had need of me.”

“Doctor Foster gave him something to lessen the pain. Morphine, I think? He’s fallen asleep.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.” Emma tested the boy’s remaining wrist for his pulse, unsurprised at its weakness but relieved to feel it steady. He’d lost the same arm as Private Fontaine, she thought idly. “Who is he?”

“Private Cheesebro?”

“Yes.”

Hopkins looked down at his little book, and over to the sleeping Private. “I – I didn’t have much time to speak with him. Nineteen. Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, then the Heavy Artillery. Father and mother at home.”

Emma settled in a chair next to the bed, across from the Chaplain. “Poor boy. That’s not much.”

“He’s from a place called Mystic,” the man in the next bed supplied, “He said so this morning.”

“Got a brother who builds boats,” said another.

“Badly,” interjected a third.

“Shi – Poor taste in poetry, too.” The man in the bed next to her – the one who had initially spoke – held a beaten paper out to her.

“Thank you, Private -?”

“Parker, ma’am. You were here this morning, weren’t you? When we were reading this?”

She glanced down. Bloackade. Victory at New Orleans. ‘The _Varuna_ ’. Something tightened in her chest, but it did neither her nor Private Cheesebro any good, and so she swallowed it. “Yes, I was. I’m afraid I missed the end. There – there was another mattered that needed my attention.”

Parker nodded. “You might read it again. Cheesey seemed to like it. Reminded him of his family.”

“If you’re sure.” She hesitated, pushing all the unpleasantness of the day away. There was a Yankee woman somewhere ministering to an ailing Virginia boy, and she was here, comforting some Yankee woman’s son. “Who has not heard of the dauntless _Varuna_? Who has not heard of the deeds she has done? Who shall not hear …”

**vi.**

The hour was late – Mary hated to think how many strokes of the clock past since the evening meal – when Jed was satisfied that Cheesebro was out of danger, and Mary had begun to admit there was nothing more to be done for Private Starks that night. Miss Green was fading fast. Pale from a long day on her feet, worries from home plain in the set of her eyes, the slump of her shoulders, she looked as though she would fall asleep on her feet.

Mary sent her up, to the library, to rest a few moments before returning to her home. It was no good to send her out like this, she reasoned, willing the kettle to boil faster. The girl needed a moment’s peace, a cup of tea, a soothing word – and a chaperone, since Miss Green had long since sent Belinda home with an apology and a vague reference to a poor soul in crisis. The peace she’d taken care of, the tea would be along presently, the words to match, and, well. She would find someone.

Tray in hand, she climbed the stairs, nodding to Matron on the way, and pointedly avoiding Hale.

A surprise awaited her. There were more faces than she expected in the library – precluding a private conversation with Miss Green, but perhaps presenting a solution to her last concern. The Chaplain had apparently laid the fire, and was dusting off his knees, while Jed was discoursing on a study of pyaemia and erisypelas a correspondent of his had been writing. To her credit, Miss Green did not resemble her name even as Jed described the process of putrefaction in a living body.

“Miss Green. Gentlemen. Good evening.”

“Nurse Mary!” Jed exclaimed, halting midway through hypotheses on lactic acid in dead tissue, “You are having evening entertainments. Was my invitation lost in the mail, perhaps to some daring enemy raid? Has Major Mosby made it so close Washington City?”

Mary closed the door behind her, and tried – hard – to look reproachful, or disapproving, but such good humor after a trying day was impossible to even contemplate quashing.

“If he has, Doctor Foster, he has not stooped to meddling with Union hospitals. The daring incursion this evening is yours.”

“I passed Miss Green on the stair. She had a question concerning infection, related to our unfortunately-named friend. I have made a start on answering – _et voila_ I”

Setting the tea things down before the fire, she darted a glance at Chaplain Hopkins, who had the decency to look even slightly ashamed, and at Miss Green, tucked away into a corner of the settee, obviously weary but no longer upset.

“I would have brought more cups, if I had known,” she said, at last.

“No need. I’d rather this.” Jed brandished an unlit cigar. “Unless anyone objects?”

No one did. “Chaplain?” Mary asked, mildly.

“No, but I’m grateful for the offer. I mean to finish writing my sister. I’d only forget it and let it grow cold.”

“If you’re sure,” she replied, before regarding Jed and Hopkins together. Nominally, either a man of god or a surgeon from a respectable family would be _almost_ acceptable escorts to bring Emma Green home. If one did not look too closely at them: the latter unhappily married, a known flirt who’d taken to calling Miss Green “Peaseblossom” in idle moments, and the former - _well_. “Can I rely on either of you to see Miss Green safe to parents’ home?”

Hopkins coughed. “I’ve already agreed to do so.”

“Yes, he’s volunteered for that duty,” Jed grinned through the smoke, careful that no one but Mary saw him.

Mary shot him a speaking look, pouring for herself and Miss Green, and pressing the chipped cup into her hands with a quiet smile. “It’s been a long and trying day. Thank you for your especial care with Private Cheesebro.”

“It was nothing,” said Miss Green, though she lacked her normal conviction.

“Not to him.”

She lowered her eyes, as if there was something fascinating in her cup, as if to demure. Mary recalled where Miss Green’s father was, and who had put him there, and continued on. “It can be difficult to care for others, when we are ourselves in need of caring. But you did an honorable thing. A good thing.”

“I have a duty.”

“Perhaps. But you have chosen to perform it here.”

Miss Green hmm-ed and sipped her tea, and Mary decided to leave it there, for now. Instead, she mentioned Nurse Hastings’ miraculous recovery without reference to the origins of her trouble, Nurses Younge and Baldwin’s success at procuring chloroform, the cleaning that would be shortly divided amongst the nurses and orderlies to prepare Mansion House for President Lincoln’s visit, and other things besides. The southern woman listened quietly, acknowledging what she had heard without much to say for her own part.

The conversation slowed, wandering like a summer-shrunk river through its drying channel. Jed looked up from his letters to ask if anyone had news of Monsieur Hugo’s new novel, for his French correspondents were annoyingly pre-occupied with that work, which, of course, none but Miss Green had – noting jealously that books were hard to come by, so close to the war, and that it’d be months before some New York publisher sent them here. She longingly described the packages of books her father imported, how lovely some were and how scandalous others, the places she had hidden as a girl to escape her governess and read. 

“Mrs. Child, and Fanny Fern’s _Leaves_ , no doubt,” Jed teased.

“Mr. Poe, when I was a child,” Miss Green protested. “He was horrible, and a child wants horrible things. I didn’t sleep for a week after ‘The Black Cat’ – and I wouldn’t let Alice, either. And surely, Doctor Foster, you can find nothing amiss with Miss Fern!”

“Can’t I?”

“I suppose you could,” she returned, Jed’s mischief bringing her back to good humor, “but think how tiresome another blue-stocking-hating man would be. And I shouldn’t believe you, anyway.”

He made to speak, but Mary forestalled him. “Doctor Foster! Have you no respect for the cleverness of Woman?”

“Some, yes, though I know when I am outmatched. The pair of you, deliberately outnumbering me! Hopkins! I require brotherly aid.”

Chaplain Hopkins looked up, startled. “My sisters correspond with Mrs. Hale. I’m afraid I’m not your man.”

It was _wretched Yankees_ , then, and Mary smiled to move into the ring, quoting Fuller and Wollestonecraft, and answering Jed’s challenges on suffrage. Miss Green, too, was happy to defend women’s education, and the conservatories she’d attended. Was not a woman’s learning as useful to medicine as her compassion? There was a woman Doctor with the Army, now – was that not testament? 

The logs in the grate snapped, the cigar burned down, and Hopkins’ letter went unanswered, all for some time, until, at last, Jed rolled his shoulders and came to his feet.

“Well,” he said, pitching the remainder of his cigar into the fire. “This has been invigorating, but these hours are for men younger and less thoroughly employed than I. Hopkins. Miss Green. Nurse Mary. I shall see you all much too soon.”

They protested, but to no avail. Mary watched him go, long limbs loose with fatigue, fading into the creeping gloom of the long summer night.

Without Jed and his endless capacity for commentary, his habitual restlessness, the library seemed quieter, and the three of them less animated. Miss Green sipped her tea, and the Chaplain’s pen resumed its scratching. Conversation lapsed, gone like the moon behind the night’s portentous clouds, and her mind wandered: poor Private Starks, next morning’s meal, Gustave’s rattling breath over a year hence. Nothing ended, in Mansion House. One thing spilled into the next. The too-young, red-haired Private – the poor man with the swollen brain – Jed’s brother – Aurelia – Private Starks – and who would be next? 

_No, none of that_ , she thought drowsily; she really must be getting Miss Green home. The woman in question was speaking, and she had not heard. “I’m sorry, I didn’t attend. What was that?”

“Captain Broke commanded the _Shannon_ , in 1813. He defeated Captain Laurence and the _Chesapeake_ in fifteen minutes, much to the shame of the young Navy.” Miss Green sounded far away, and as though she were quoting someone else. When Mary did not respond, she continued, “I overheard you and Doctor Foster speaking with Nurse Hastings, this morning.”

Mary half-laughed at to hear it, that Anne Hastings had found yet another way to prove her very British superiority. “I might have expected that, or something to that extent. You are surprisingly knowledgeable, Miss Green. Thank you.”

She flushed a little, at the praise, and ducked her head. “We – my sister, my brother, our childhood friends – were all a little mad for the Navy. Our friend’s brother went with Commodore Perry, to Japan, and brought back such wondrous things. Ensign Stringfellow. I was half in love with him at thirteen.” 

Miss Green smiled, a little bit, at her girlhood self. Embarrassed as though that was far behind her, and not only a few years gone. Struggling to hide a yawn, she shifted in her seat on the settee, before rising to her feet. “I must go now, Nurse Mary. My mother will worry. If you have need of any more knowledge about your Navy, Mr. Cooper’s _History_ is on that shelf. Chaplain?”

Across the room, Hopkins set aside his writing desk and his writing. “I shall see Miss Green safely home, and return shortly,” he said, unnecessarily, as though to convince himself as much any other thing. Mary resolved to tell Jed that he was right about Miss Green’s inadvertent conquest, but at some future, quieter point.

Mary rose to her feet to see Miss Green off, and was not a little surprised that she took her hand, and pressed it warmly. “Thank you, Nurse Mary. For your kindness to me.”

“I will see you tomorrow morning, Miss Green. Be well.” 

Miss Green nodded firmly, in response, as she herself had long been in the habit of doing – and Chaplain Hopkins followed her out the door. _Succor and comfort_ , the verse came to her again. So short a time, and so much had changed. Mary began to clear away the tea-things, humming.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a while! This is quite self-indulgent, and if you've gotten this far, I am very, very sorry!
> 
> Credit where it's due: Jed calling Emma "Peaseblossom" is 100% the incomparable middlemarch, in "to know the thing I am forbidden to know" - I couldn't resist referencing it. 
> 
> I broadly set this during episode 1x06, but, on rewatching the episode, realized that there's pretty much no time between Jed going to speak with Bullen about the chloroform shortage and cauterizing Private Starks' nerve, so, ah, I messed the teensiest bit with the episode timeline. Mea culpa.
> 
> Obnoxious historical notes time! The poem - "The Varuna" - that started this little Mansion House drama is real, as is George Henry Boker, the author. The poem commemorates the actions of the _Varuna_ during the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, on April 24th, 1862 - A Union fleet under Admiral David Glasgow Farragut (later of "Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!" fame) sailed up the Mississippi towards New Orleans, eventually leading to the city falling into Union hands. Great for the Union, but the _Varuna_ sank in the action. The poem appeared May 12th, in the _Philadelphia Press_ \- so, apparently, Mansion House is a little behind the literary times, but I'm chalking it up to a delayed care package.
> 
> The _Varuna_ was, as poor Private Cheesebro claims, built in Mystic, Connecticut, at one of the Mallory shipyards. The Mallory family had made a tidy fortune in shipbuilding by the start of the Civil War, and made still more by helping build the Union fleet, but the patriarch, Charles, Sr., was in a bit of a ticklish situation - his cousin, Stephen R. Mallory, was the Confederate Secretary of the Navy. I really tried to jam that in somehow, but, alas. 
> 
> Cheesebro/Cheeseborough was a reasonably common name around Mystic/SE Connecticut generally in the 18th and 19th centuries, I'm not just being mean to the poor guy.
> 
> As far as the rest of the maritime mayhem goes, "Casabianca" is another, better known and much-mocked poem (even at the time), nominally about the explosion of _L'Orient_ at the Battle of the Nile, but mostly about filial duty and whatnot. "Casabianca" was published in 1826, and was widely reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic. Both Anne and Mary would probably have encountered it? Honestly, this feels like the most unrealistic part of the story for me.
> 
> "Beast Butler" in Emma's monologue is General Benjamin Butler, the military governor of New Orleans after the Union took the city. Butler's General Order No. 28 stated that any woman who insulted or abused Union officers and soldiers would be treated as a prostitute - in response to women of New Orleans protesting Union control by, among other things, dropping full chamberpots on their heads. Butler was pretty damn unpopular, but recovered enough to become the Governor of Massachusetts after the war.
> 
> I name-dropped A Lot in section **vi.** , in part because I stopped writing this fic for a week because I went on a bender about women's education in the 40's, 50's, and 60's, and I wanted to make myself believe that the time I spent buzzing through that and backissues of _Godey's Lady's Book_ wasn't for nothing, though it manifestly was. Anyway, I return to doubling down on the fanon that Emma is very well read, and wavered a bit about what Mary and Emma would think of the label "blue-stocking". As one does.
> 
> Technically, this is happening concurrently with _her eye discourses_ , so Gielgud and company are lurking in the wings, ready to press-gang unsuspecting staff members and initiate them into the Mansion House Players. 
> 
> In keeping with the needless nautical nonsense, the title is from Herman Melville's "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight".
> 
> Disclaimer: I have zero idea how to properly pronounce "Varuna", so all of this wrangling over it is 50% speculation, and 50% spurious "research" carried out by asking co-workers how they would pronounce it. I hope I'm forgiven!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Sleep when you can](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16583972) by [middlemarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch)
  * [More ponderous than nimble](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17025843) by [sagiow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagiow/pseuds/sagiow)
  * [Beyond the strife of fleets heroic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17413445) by [sagiow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagiow/pseuds/sagiow)




End file.
